The words "health" and "video games" don't usually appear together. Video game-playing, by and large, is a sedentary activity, involving your hands but little else. There are a couple notable exceptions, like Dance Dance Revolution. There's also the newly-announced Kilowatt, a video game controller that requires you to use your entire upper body (BBC News has a piece on the device). [Update 2/5/2004: The New York Times has an article on it now, too.]
Of course, mixing electronics and exercise is nothing new. Specialized computer programs and monitoring systems have long been used by world-class athletes to analyze and improve their performance, or in rehabilitation programs, and amateur athletes have used heart monitors, pedometers, and other devices for years. Yet despite a number of attempts to combine video games and exercise, the two have not managed to play well together.
A decade ago, a few companies developed exercise equipment that combined video games with stationary bicycles or treadmills. By riding or running, users would move through a course, or compete against other athletes. But health clubs shied away from the machines because they were far more expensive than conventional equipment, and the games weren't interesting enough to draw gamers into gyms.
Anyone who has followed attempts at media "convergence"—whether it be Internet and television, Hollywood and electronics—will recognize this pattern: such arranged marriages between different media rarely work. However, the market is starting to revive, thanks to developments in health technology and video games, as well as economic trends.
Monitoring. Monitoring devices are becoming cheaper, less intrusive, and more sophisticated. Simple heart rate monitors are small enough to fit inside clothing. Heart monitor systems made by the Finnish company Polar, for example, include a heart monitor, wireless transmitter, and watch that displays current heart rate. The more sophisticated BodyMedia armband can measure such things as acceleration and galvanic skin response, and can tell us things like total calories burned or the onset time of sleep. Polar and BodyMedia devices both upload data to exercise Web sites, and integrate that information into lifestyle planning for nutrition, physical conditioning, and other activities.
Both the Polar and BodyMedia Web sites are proprietary: to use the service, you have to use the device. Likewise, dieting systems (which rely on reporting, rather than monitoring) are currently proprietary. However, given that exercise devices monitor the same kinds of vital signs, it would be a relatively simple matter to create versions that reported their data in XML or an XML-based exercise markup language, to be used on any standards-compatible program, and to integrate exercise and weight management programs.
Game Economies. Motivation to exercise is always a problem. One potential way to deal with it is to create links between exercise and massive multi-player role-playing games (or MMPRPGs for short) like Everquest, Sims Online, and Lineage. These games really are massive: Everquest has almost half a million players, 60,000 of whom are playing at any moment; Lineage has 4 million players, including 10% of all Korean men; and upcoming games like Sims Online and Star Wars promise to be even bigger.
MMPRPG worlds are already spilling over into the physical world. Lineage players are organized into clans who gather at local cybercafes to launch assaults against enemies; gamers in the U.S. gather in "LAN parties." Everquest fanatics have created an underground economy, trading characters, weapons, and rare goods via eBay and other auction sites. (You can also do this within the game, but as with many state-run economies, the underground one has proved faster and more lucrative.) The notion of gaming worlds having serious economic potential may once have been amusing, but McDonalds and Intel each spent about $2 million to place restaurants and advertisements in the Sims Online universe.
These efforts by hackers and corporations lay a foundation for creating tie-ins between real services and virtual worlds. These tie-ins would use games to reinforce good behavior. For example, your Sims Online character could gain health points as you lose weight, and put them back on if you abandon your diet. Or your health club awards your Everquest character strength and agility as you reach your fitness goals– and takes them away if you go off your exercise regimen.
Kinesthetic Electronics. Attempts to meld video games and exercise machines are reviving. Arcade game maker Konami (best-known for Metal Gear Solid) has had success in Asia and Europe with a line of exercise machines featuring arcade-level games. Sports equipment manufacturers have developed devices that connect exercise equipment to game consoles or PCs, allowing users to mix and match their own exercises and games. Such devices could help the ailing arcade game industry. The number of arcade games in the U.S. dropped from 750,000 to 450,000 during the 1990s, and a number of game makers have ceased production of arcade machines. The bright spot in the industry has been kinesthetic games like Dance Dance Revolution, in which players interact with the game by dancing, and simulators for boxing and snowboarding.
Most kinesthetic video games attempt to simulate familiar activities or sports, just as developers of the earliest video games imitated old sports—Ping Pong, pinball, and board games—before developing entirely new genres of games. One thing we might see in the future are real spaces, saturated with sensors and smart materials, that allow for new sorts of physical sports—the equivalent of the data caves that military and scientific researchers now use to project and interact with large bodies of information. A few companies are already producing playing fields that interact with players, or changes with the progress of the game. In Makoto Arena, for example, players use a staff to strike lighted targets on three towers. Sportswall has developed a series of computer-controlled backboards with targets and sensors; these are used mainly for training tennis players, but the company has also developed children's games with the same technology. Ping Pong Plus, an MIT Media Lab creation, overlaid sensors and a screen on a ping-pong table: players were able to design new games that required cooperation rather than competition, or projected a school of virtual fish that scattered whenever the ball landed near them.
These are all prototype or proprietary, and hence expensive, systems. But as the cost of displays and sensors falls, we can expect to see a wider variety of such reactive spaces, and eventually the creation of an open platform that developers can use to fashion new games. (It is also worth noting that these spaces are used more to develop speed and coordination, rather than strength. This is part of a larger growth in the popularity of stretching and flexibility exercises.)
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